winter farm scenes

but what happens on the farm in the winter?? is a question i get a lot, and a question i still kind of have when eggboy spends the whole morning at our kitchen table looking at a lot of numbers and symbols and government-y looking forms, drinking all of the coffee and eating the whole batch of caramel rolls that farmer chad and anna delivered.

i talked a bit about this during my modern farmer takeover this weekend, but i'm gonna expand on everything now!

1. we can fly places! like hawaii. and next month, berlin. the winter is a farmer's summer, so around now is when we're able to plan in advance and get away for more than a couple of days. in the summer, there are quieter times when eggboy is able to leave for a few days at a time, but it's impossible to tell more than a week or two in advance, so all of our little adventures in the summer are to places like fargo or bemidji, that we can plan last minute and then get to in our buick boat.

2. taxes. ok i'm not sure if this is eggboy just getting *really* excited about paperwork and numbers like the weirdo that he is, or if this is a normal farmer thing, (or maybe a general business owner thing?), but he spends tons of time on paperwork and hanging out with his accountant. paperwork literally takes up about half of his work hours.

3. equipment maintenance. over the farming season, if a tractor breaks down, there may not be time for a full on repair, so eggboy or eggpop will fix it just enough so that it will work through the season, and then over the winter they can give it the full attention it needs. all of the tractors need oil changes, bubble baths, and software updates so that they can be good as new for spring planting.

4. school! there are a lot of farmer workshops in the winter, about technology, soils, marketing, and so much more. you can tell you're at a farming workshop when the parking lot is full of pickup trucks that are twice as tall as you. (and then there's eggboy in his buick boat that he refuses to get rid of.)

5. grain gets hauled to the mill and then turned into flour. unlike sugar beets, which need to go to the processing plant as soon as they're picked, grain gets stored on our farm and brought to the town mill at various times throughout the winter, depending on the markets.

6. eggboy plays trombone. every day! and comes to the gym with me almost every day too. we're getting ripped! 

7. eggboy sleeps in. just kidding, he wakes up at 6:30 every morning no matter what. tofu the rooster does too. 

8. macaroni slow down their egg laying. there were a few months this winter when we were only getting one or two eggs every other day :( luckily now since there is a teensy bit more sunlight, we're now up to three or four a day and i can have my new favorite breakfast, a ketchup and macaroni egg taco. 😁 

9. sven cat and ole cat continue to be sven cat and ole cat. they cuddle, roam, hang out on the tractors, receive belly rubs, do general cat things as if it were any other time of the year. 

-yeh! 

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last photo by chantell quernemoen

macaroni's first egg!!!!!!

we hyperventilated for five minutes straight. and then omg-ed for five more. it was the greatest hanukkah present ever in all the land! one teeny tiny egg, too small for most of our egg cups and very lightly speckled. everything we've waited for since june (they grow up so fast!). we cuddled it and stared at it and finally decided that we should eat it ceremoniously, out of the egg cup we bought on our honeymoon.

we wanted a six-minute egg, but with such a dainty little specimen we reduced the time to five and it was perfect. firm whites, a yolk the thickness of honey. and its color! we kvelled so hard, we've never been prouder. is this what having an honor roll student is like? can i get a bumper sticker about all this? 

we spread our little egg onto buttered toast and sprinkled it with salt while the snow came down outside. it was tasty and bucolic af. now we're researching how to bronze the shell so we can keep it on our mantel forever and ever. 

we're so proud of you, macaroni!!

-yay!

a little tractor adventure

well, it was a big tractor, but a little adventure.

the tractor needed a new part, so eggboy had to drive it to the fix-it man.

junior cat was not allowed to come.

but i was! here is the view from the buddy seat as we drove down the highway and stopped traffic. tractors don't go very fast! eggboy was focused on not hitting any bunnies but he still smiled for my rearview mirror picture. what a guy.

(no cars ahead of us, they are all stuck behind us.)

we even drove across the bridge to north dakota.

past my favorite sign... 

and my other favorite sign... (look, the grain mill in the background!)

and then we arrived at the tractor fix-it place on the edge of town, where a row of combines welcomed us with glee.

eggdad picked us up in his pickup and gave us popcorn because you can get free popcorn at a lot of the farm shops in town. it was salty and tasty and perfect with eggboy's hat sweat. 

the end!

-yeh!

lucerne

our time there was brief and not terribly eventful, but it was beautiful and the coffee alone was enough to make me reconsider my whole life plan: find a new job and adopt a new value system that will enable me to justify spending $5,000 on a swiss coffee maker. each time we had coffee, eggboy and i could do nothing more than sit and sip and let our eyes roll to the back of our heads as we tried to find new ways to voice our love for this dark sweet buttery coffee that was thick as soup and finished too soon. 

fondue can wait, order seven more coffees.

let's marry this coffee.

let's have babies with this coffee. 

let's hijack the keystone pipeline, reroute it from lucerne to east grand forks, and then make it carry this coffee.

our love and obsession turned into confusion towards american coffee. how is it possible that thin watery bottomless coffee exists all over the states when even the coffee in the innsbruck train station lobby makes me want to lie on the ground and cuddle with it all day?

i'll shut up now. and then go make a swiss coffee maker fund piggy bank at the paint your own pottery place. 

there's this other thing i want to tell you about! chügelipasteteli. it's my new favorite word. (even though for the longest time we called it chügelipügeli because we kept forgetting the second part of the word.) it's a lucerne specialty that's basically a mountain shaped chicken pot pie with veal and meatballs instead of chickens. it was the thing you want to eat most when it's cold outside and you're dusted with snow. the one that we had was decorated with puff pastry hearts, so yes, i was obsessed from the beginning. 

other goodies we ate in lucerne were eggboy's first döner, a bunch of marzipan, an easter tart, breakfast like there was no tomorrow, and, of course fondue. it was great fondue, smelly fondue. we were touristy about it and had it at a touristy place, but we were, after all, tourists. 

-yeh!